1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to system management servers, and management methods and programs in a printing system in which print document information and printing device information of a tenant are assigned to a plurality of servers to perform distributed management.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there is a known print document management system which manages document data to be printed and printers (print destinations). The print document management system receives document data from a user application or another document management system, produces print document information, and holds the print document information in association with the document data. Thereafter, the print document management system executes a printing process in response to a user's request for execution of printing, and adds the result of the printing process to the print document information.
In recent years, as the Internet has become widespread and the speed of networks has increased, functions conventionally provided by software have been more often provided as services on the Internet. The print document management system is also used as a back end for such services. Note that if a service is provided on the Internet, it is necessary to provide the service to a plurality of tenants (contracting entities (units), such as companies etc.).
In a data management method which is used when a service is provided to a plurality of tenants, a database is typically divided into areas for the respective tenants. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-026653 proposes a data access control technique which can facilitate the development of an application which accesses a database having different data areas for respective tenants.
However, the print document management system serving as a back end for a service on the Internet needs to handle a much larger number of users, print documents, and printers than the number of those of an intranet. Therefore, the print document management system needs to be configured so that a plurality of servers can form a cluster. The print document management system also needs to be configured to handle an increased number of users, print documents, and printers by increasing the number of servers (scaling out). As a technique of achieving such a configuration, there is a distributed data technique called consistent hashing.
However, when a separate system (server) is assigned to each tenant, the operating ratio of a system (server) which provides a service to a small-scale tenant is low, leading to high operation cost of the entire service. On the other hand, when a single system provides a print service to a plurality of tenants, then if data is distributed without considering the tenants, the cost of a process which is performed on a tenant-by-tenant basis (e.g., scaling out) increases.